You've missed the HH5 from the possibilities
Oh god don't i worked for BT many years ago and to be honest some of the gear they put out today is a right pile of (BLEEP) The HH3 and its low spec for VDSL was a joke, the HH4 pretty much pointless and the HH5 is as reliable as a 3 legged horse. The ECI and Huawei modems while good even had initial teething issues with heat and PSUs, and why they locked them down i do not know, old school engineers must hate having to plug in their test gear see there is an issue with the line but have no real idea how the line got to the state it did. They can not even plug in equipment and run diagnosis on the modems/routers today, which no doubt leads to replacements which are not needed. Im glad i got away before the do not think approach took over.
However, my money would be on the Billion or Asus. I don't know enough about TP-Link to know whether they would be any good or not and a quick look on the site for that model shows no updates in firmware yet showing additional line stats. That said I believe it uses a Lantiq based modem so if you're connecting to an ECI cabinet then that might be the better option.
Yeah the TP-Link W9980 is a Lantiq chipset, as good as performs the same as an ECI openreach modem, no real issues with it reading sites like kitz apart from slightly slower (a matter of a few hundred kbps) line rates on huawei cabinets and no detailed stat reporting. If i was buying FTTC tomorrow from an ISP with no supplied equipment its probably what i would start with due to A. Cheap price and B. Having no real issues to speak of. Does more than what most would want/need.
Ideally though id like a bit more hence still torn between the more feature filled Asus and Billion.
I've the 8800NL as I thought I would try that before getting an unlocked HG612 and it did what I expected it to. The only thing I noticed is that ping times were 1-2ms higher consistently with the 8800NL than my separate ECI modem, but that may be down to Broadcom modem connecting to an ECI cabinet. Not a huge issue, apart for online gamers.
It is more likely how it routes traffic at the device, having only 100Mb ports does not help either, was the ping the same when using the 1000Mb port on its own or with a gigabit switch? I considered the NL but although i rarely use it the wifi is pretty weak, for the same price at least the TP-Link has N600 the 8800NL unless im mistaken is only old N300. Same for the Ethernet ports all gigabit on the TPLink, at £70(ish) price point id take features over stats. The £100-200 price bracket becomes a more difficult decision. SIGNIFICANTLY Over £200 i think is just pointless for most even dare i say (here comes my old man head) a waste of money. That said I wouldn't be shocked if i end up wasting my own cash and buying 2 devices
I'm getting Sky fibre activated on Thursday, currently on Sky broadband, with an DSL-AC68U...
Now considering my connection is currently showing as interleaved, I assume due to this daft router, will this affect my fibre speed, or is it a case that i'm essentially starting afresh with dlm on my new fibre setup?
I was considering using my new Sky hub as the modem and running my AC68 as purely a router through dual wan, would that be worthwhile / cause any issues with determining speed over just running the Sky Hub on it's own?
Are you coming from ADSL? Or do you have VDSL already from another provider and just moving to Sky?
If you are currently ADSL then current stats will have basically zero to do with what VDSL/FTTC will give.
Regardless for the first 2 weeks use the ISP supplied gear while the line settles and DLM decides if it needs to do anything.
